Jim wrote on Mar 9, 2024, 18:48:
so… Prices went up because of Covid. Covid is gone, big business is raking in the cash, prices sure as hell aren’t going to go down. Blame Biden am I right? Republicans had blocked anti-inflation measures. I guess they want to solve the problem by giving more tax cuts for the rich.
Not trying to be the "well actually" dude.. but...
Covid is not gone. We have just learned to painfully live with it. 6.5% of the American population are positive for c19 daily, that's 21,515,000 people. (source: CDC) Currently about 600 people die every day from it despite the vaccine's ability to lessen the symptoms. We managed it down to not be so deadly....not because people aren't getting it. The problem though is somewhat similarily to cancer survivors, living through it can literally be only half the battle. We are starting to get a much better idea of what C19 does to the body in the long term. It's not good and it's expensive. Pulmonary, cadiac, neurological, and even renal systems can go through such stress during infection that it causes long term damage that the patient then has to manage for the rest of their lives. At first "they" thought that only people that suffered from unusually long battles with c19 were having these affects, but that is not turning out to be the case. The longer we go from January 2020, the more of these cases are found. The long term affect on the patients and the health care industry is very likely to be crazy in terms of costs.
I think of it like this, roughly 17 million Americans have a type of cancer at any given time. (source: CDC) The fatality rate is 3 times as high, and that's all the forms of cancer put together. I am not comparing C19 to cancer, they are different, this is purely for the numbers. I also do not want to be insensitive to anyone that has lost a loved one to cancer or be overly crass about death, but leaving less survivors is cheaper on the family and medical system as a whole. Survivors very frequently require expensive care for the rest of their lives. We have all heard the staggering numbers with regards to the money put towards cancer research and treatment yearly and its affecting 4 million people less per day then C19. It doesn't take a genius to see where I am going here. C19 isn't just here to stay, it has the real possiblity of being more financially costly to patients and the health care industry alike then cancer ever has been. Nearly everyone is getting c19 at least once in their lives regardless of the vaccine for the foreseeable future. It will likely be the case that published infection rates will be lower then reality for some time. It mutates too fast to believe otherwise, just like influenza. Imagine the costs and effects if everyone got some form of survivable cancer at least once in their life?
I only take the time to type this because I work in the middle management layer of the health care industry, so I get ansy when people say something that makes it sound like c19 isn't an issue anymore. (even casually) I get ansy because opinions effect votes and votes effect elections and elections effect budgets. I hate that health care can be polticial but our polticial parties have done that so now the only difference between two idiots may be which one thinks vaccines are beneficial and which one thinks they are CIA tracking devices. It is incredibly important that people get their boosters to make sure that if they do get it...it's as short an infection as possible so they lessen their chances of long term effects. I know I am not only speaking for the health care company I work for when I say that a significant amount of our staffing and resources are devoted to making sure our patients survive C19. Staffing and resources that were allocated to other things before the 'pandemic' and still aren't back to where they were because....as the math indicates...covid didn't go anywhere. 77.5% percent of the population has had it at least once. We aren't ever going back to "normal", and for many patients, they aren't either. We have to budget with it now as much as we ever did.
I told a buddy that I think of our national population's reaction to C19 the same as those yaks and zebras that have to cross crocodile infestered rivers during their migration. They just hit the run button aiming for the other side. They trample or get trampled by eachother while getting jumped by crocodiles they probably didnt know were even there. If we compare that to our nation's response to C19, we literally just got to the other side of the river for the second or third time. We are getting better at it but during elections we still trample eachother a bit and the crocodiles are definitly still there to kill a few of us. Additionally, we now also know that the other side of the river has lions to deal with.